Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how
inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of
visually-impaired people, those "inconveniences" represent something
much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing
eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK's
most respected technology journalists and also, sadly, is losing his
sight. As he points out in a powerful new piece, things ought to be getting better for the visually impaired in the Internet age:

Any EU project called "Clean IT",
with all that implies for elements that are regarded as "dirty", is
worrying enough. But combined with a stated intention of "reducing the
impact of the terrorist use of the Internet", the concerns naturally
grow. After all, it is precisely by invoking the vague and emotional
threat of "terrorism" that the UK government has sought to short-circuit
criticism of many of its most illiberal policies, most recently with
the ill thought-out Draft Communications Bill.

Just when you think the Megaupload farce can't get any more ridiculous, it does. Following revelations
that New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau illegally
intercepted communications in the Megaupload case and provided those
details to law enforcement authorities, the country's Prime Minister has
been forced to apologize personally to Kim Dotcom:
"Of course I apologize to Mr Dotcom, and I apologize to New
Zealanders." From his position of increasing strength as more and more
missteps by the New Zealand authorities come to light, Dotcom graciously accepted those apologies.

Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported
that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the
search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would
inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously
thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing
that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to
flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in
paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well:

Neelie Kroes is not your average European Commissioner. Before she
became the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, her current post,
she was European Commissioner for Competition, and in that capacity made
a speech about open standards in 2008, which included the following statements:

As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page."

A recent scandal in the UK concerned the country's worst sporting
disaster, when 96 football/soccer fans were crushed to death at a
stadium in Hillsborough in 1989. Prime Minister David Cameron issued an official apology to the families of the victims
for the fact that the safety measures at the ground were known to be
inadequate, and that police and emergency services had tried to deflect
the blame for the disaster onto fans.

The debate is still raging whether Bitcoin is a brilliant idea that will revolutionize business and society, a high-tech money laundering scheme, or just a fad that will soon pass into history. But in a fascinating post, Jon Matonis points to a problem that doesn't really seem to have been considered before:

Back in February we wrote
about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to
combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we
suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared
(pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial
removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as
deranged.

As Techdirt observed
back in 2007, Brazilian artists were some of the first to recognize
that piracy can be a positive force that helps get the word out about
their creations. That was part of a larger openness to new ideas about
copyright that was symbolized by the appointment of the well-known
Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil
as Minister of Culture, a post he held from 2003 until 2008. However,
more recently, things have gone into reverse on the copyright front.
Ana de Hollanda, the Minister of Culture appointed by the current
President, ordered the CC license to be removed from the Ministry of
Culture's website, and there were indications that harsher copyright laws were coming.

One of the depressing things about net neutrality is that it is a
battle that must be won again and again. It's becoming increasingly
clear that another effort will be made by telecoms companies to destroy
net neutrality at the big World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT). Here's how it describes itself:

Techdirt has had many posts pointing out that the huge and vibrant fashion industry is a perfect demonstration that you don't need monopolies to succeed, and that bringing in copyright for clothes and accessories now would be positively harmful. One of the people who's been making that point for years is Kal Raustiala (co-author of this month's Techdirt book club choice, The Knockoff Economy). NPR Books has just posted a short interview with him that succinctly explains why copyright would be a disaster for the fashion industry. Here are a couple of the key points.

Julia Schramm is one of the rising stars of the German Pirate Party:
in April, when she was just 27 years old, she was elected to the
national party's executive committee. No surprise, then, that she is
against copyright: in a podcast she described intellectual property as
"disgusting" (original in German.)
More surprising is that, despite this, she signed a contract with
Knaus-Verlag, part of the publishing giant Random House group, to write a
book. Perhaps the $130,000 advance had something to do with it.

Reports about open source tend to be rather one-sided: either
polemics against, or propaganda for, depending on who's paying for them.
That makes a new report written by Jim Norton, former President of the
BCS, with the rather unoriginal title "Open for Business", particularly welcome, since it has been sponsored by Amadeus, which describes itself as follows:

Police and security forces around the world -- and that includes in
the West -- hate being recorded when they're overstepping the mark in
the execution of their duties, since it allows the public to challenge
official accounts, and even to use videos to seek redress.
But there's one thing worse than being recorded, and that's being
livestreamed: even the most nimble authorities can't confiscate the
recording from its creator, since it's already been uploaded for the
world to see.

Well, here's a nice contrast: just when a judge in the US has ruled
that users there have no obligation to lock down their wifi
connections, a court in France decides the exact opposite. What makes
the story even more significant is that the individual concerned is the
first person to be convicted under France's 3-strikes law, generally
known as HADOPI.

13 September 2012

Open data continues to spread around the world - here's a great recent summary
of what's happening where. But simply making government data available
is no longer enough: now we need to move on to the far trickier job of
doing something with it.

The negotiations behind closed doors of major treaties like ACTA and
TPP, and the refusal of participants to release official drafts or to
engage in any kind of substantive dialog, has meant that activists and
observers have been obliged to seize upon even the smallest signs and
hints emerging from those talks in an attempt to guess what is going on.
In a way, we are witnessing the birth of a new form of Kremlinology, which Wikipedia explains as follows:

When we talk of free software, we typically think of things like GNU/Linux,
Apache or Firefox. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is that
of multimedia codecs. There's a good reason for this: most of them are
patent-encumbered, which makes using them with free software hard -
well, hard if you want to do it legally. In practice, most people have
employed implementations of dubious legality, and the licensors have
taken the sensible view that they are hardly losing millions from this
kind of activity, and have turned a blind eye.

As Techdirt reported,
the European Commission is conducting a major consultation on the
"procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online
intermediaries" that could radically affect the liability of online
service providers in the European Union. Other parts of the world are
doubtless examining this area too, and one at least -- Chile -- has
already come up with a novel approach.

Despite the absence of credible studies supporting the idea, part of
the copyright maximalist dogma is that the wider the reach of copyright,
and the stricter the application, the better. As a corollary,
copyright exceptions are anathema, which is why the US and EU are still
shamefully resisting
an international treaty that would enable more books covered by
copyright to be produced in versions suitable for the visually impaired,
since it would create a minor exception to help make that happen.

Back in July, I warned
about the imminent threat of software patents sneaking into Europe
thanks to horse-trading over the proposed EU Unitary Patent. Nothing
happened then, but purely because MEPs turned to far more important matters - their summer holidays. Now that those balmy days are over, MEPs are back at work, and the Unitary Patent rears its misbegotten head again.

For the last year, it seemed like the German Pirate Party could do no wrong. In November 2011, it won 9% of the vote in the Berlin parliamentary elections, then 7.4% in Saarland in March, 8.2% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein in May, and a similar level in North Rhine-Westphalia shortly afterwards. There was a little pushback from copyright maximalists, but after ACTA's defeat
in July, you might have expected the Pirates to be riding even higher
in the public's favor. A recent article in the German news magazine Der
Spiegel reveals that's far from the case:

The term "open source" was coined back in February 1998, and
initially it applied only to software. But as the power of open,
collaborative development became apparent, other spheres have adopted
the "open" tag along with the underlying approach. Here's the latest
example -- open source planes:

The draft bill of the UK's "Snooper's Charter",
which would require ISPs to record key information about every email
sent and Web site visited by UK citizens, and mobile phone companies to
log all their calls, was published back in July. Before it is debated
by politicians, a Joint Committee from both the House of Commons and
House of Lords is conducting "pre-legislative scrutiny."

As long-standing readers will know, alongside ACTA, the other main theme of this blog over the last year or so has been the battle for the soul of open standards,
which culminated in the UK government's consultation on the subject.
We don't yet know what the outcome there will be, but whatever it is,
the issue of open standards will only increase in importance.

In the UK there is currently a campaign and associated petition from
the organization "Safety Net: Protecting Innocence Online", which calls
for mandatory Net filtering of pornography -- people would need to opt
out of the system if they wanted to view this material. The
justification -- of course -- is the usual "won't someone think of the
children?" Here's the pitch:

The BitTorrent protocol is an extremely efficient way of moving files
around the Internet, especially big ones. That makes it highly popular
with those seeking to download unauthorized copies of music and films,
for example. But the clever approach that enables BitTorrent to do
that, which involves downloading fragments of a file from a shifting
swarm of fellow peers holding some or all of it, is also a weakness from
these users' point of view: it means that downloads take place in
public, rather than as a private transaction from a client to a server
(as with cyber lockers.)

Nathan Myhrvold is trying to rustle up a little positive PR for Intellectual Ventures (IV) by appointing a VP of Global Good
(although it's hard to see how anyone lumbered with such a daft job
title is going to be taken seriously anywhere.) You can gauge just how
touchy Myhrvold is on this topic by his rather waspish response to some
commentary on that move.

This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA
in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what
will be the next moves of those behind SOPA and ACTA as they seek to
regain the initiative? For SOPA, we've had a clue in the call for a "Son of SOPA" from the US Chamber of Commerce. But what about the European Commission?

03 September 2012

Even after ACTA was rejected
by the European Parliament on 4 July this year, the European Commission
was still refusing to admit that the treaty was misguided and
dangerous. To this day, it's not clear what it is planning in terms of
trying to bring it back in another form, or by negotiating some kind of ACTA Lite with the other signatories.

The reaction to the jury's decision in the US patent infringement
case between Apple and Samsung has been rather remarkable. I've seen it
called all kinds of turning and inflection points for the
computing/mobile world, as if we are entering some strange new era whose
landscape is weird and unknown to us. This is utter nonsense. I don't
think Apple's "stunning" or "total" victory - all phrases I've seen
bandied about - is particularly stunning, or even a victory.

The Draft Communications Bill [.pdf]
is one of the most controversial pieces of UK legislation proposed in
recent years - not least because it represents a betrayal of election
promises by the coalition to roll back state surveillance in the UK.
As usual, the government is attempting to claim that current plans are
"different" because the databases are distributed, not centralised; but
the fact that searches will be possible across all the decentralised
holdings means that there is no practical difference. This is quite
simply another example of politicians promising one thing to get
elected, and then doing its opposite.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.